Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding Debate
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Jim Cunningham
Main Page: Jim Cunningham (Labour - Coventry South)Department Debates - View all Jim Cunningham's debates with the Department for Education
Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Funding
Jim Cunningham Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Sir Vince Cable
Indeed. In addition to the problem facing local authorities, schools in effect pay a £6,000 penalty. Many schools that were committed to inclusion now find that increasingly difficult and are shying away from their obligations.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I fully agree with him about funding for special needs schools. Hereward College in Coventry has struggled with funding for a number of years, and does an excellent job. Another dimension is that children who have mental health problems often go home to a disruptive family life. That is not conducive to their education or mental health. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that something should be done about that?
Sir Vince Cable
Yes, I do. By mentioning mental health, the hon. Gentleman reinforces the point that I will go on to make. When we talk about special needs pupils, we are talking about significantly different classes of people with fundamentally different problems. Of course, they are all individuals, but we are talking about 1.2 million people altogether in the SEN system—up by about 0.5 million since 2014. About a quarter of them, according to Mencap, have learning difficulties. That actually understates the problem, because Mencap estimates that about 40% of children with learning difficulties are never identified at school.
About 120,000 children are on the autistic spectrum, which is the most rapidly growing and difficult group to accommodate. About 300,000 have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Others have a physical disability. I have had correspondence with those with visual impairment problems, who lack equipment, and other groups such as deaf children, who are not included in the SEN categories at all.
We are dealing with large numbers of very different categories of people, but what they have in common is that demand for EHCPs is growing rapidly: it has grown by about 35% over the four years since the legislation was enacted, which is about three times the growth of the school population. It is also three times the amount of funding available through the Government grant allocation.